The Exposed Id Of The DFL; Again, Always
By Mitch Berg
Back in February, 11-year-old Grace Evans testified in front of a Minnesota House committee against gay marriage.
Now, let’s back up a minute: I have supported civil unions – as well as getting government out of the business of administering and giving benefits for marriage – for quite a while. I also note that the only really solid arguments for gay marriage come from libertarian conservatives. Liberals, for the most part, appeal either to emotion (“shouldn’t two people who love each other be able to marry?”) or illogic (“we don’t have popularity contests over civil rights!”) or demands to fall in line with grouphink (“if you oppose gay marriage, you’re teh bigot!”).
One of the reasons I supported the Marriage Amendment – in a back-handed way – was that I thought it might force gay marriage supporters to come up with a rational argument, rather than more browbeating and emotional manipulation. We found out in 2012 that money trumps reason. So it goes.
And so today, the Minnesota left is still stuck on stupid, mixing “browbeating” for debate. Which brings us back to Miss Evans’ testimony. Lefties, naturally, took spittle-flecked umbrage:
One comment on YouTube called Grace Evans “an 11-year-old bigot.” Another said, “shame on you little girl, your speech was —.” Another comment on YouTube said, “What is sad is im (sic) certain this girl will grow up and support full marriage equality but yet she will be haunted by this.”
On the Facebook page for The Uptake, a Minnesota news [sic] website, someone posted a comment, “Stupid Indoctrinated Child.”
A comment posted on the local CBS affiliate website said, “Who ever (sic) spoon fed their child that script to read in front of everyone needs to check into a mental hospital. You are using your kids as pawns in your selfish game. Hopefully one day that child will grow up to think on their own, and then come to the realization that their parents did them a huge disservice by indoctrinating them into this school of hate.”
Say what you will about gay marriage; I have little problem with it legally (while noting that it does open the logical door to all sorts of forms of “marriage” that society abjures today, whether you like it or not), and understand the moral case. I also disagree with the devaluation of the value of gender in parenting (which is a genuine threat to this society), and also know damn well that once it’s the law of the land there will be legal attacks on any institution that doesn’t support it; the First Amendment will “protect” dissenting groups and tradition-supporting churches about as well as the Second protects law-abiding shooters in Chicago, or Tenth guards the delegation of powers; exactly as much as the most-powerful clique at the Capitol and the skill of their exquisitely-expensive lawyers allows them to.
April 1st, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Haven’t said it enough, but if restrictions were placed on teh gayz ability to involve kids, my objections (other than a logical rejection) evaporate. They can have their little parties and call it whatever they want.
April 1st, 2013 at 1:18 pm
It is also noteworthy that the hypocritical GLBT radicals want “equality,” yet they vilify this girl. I guess it’s OK to use children as pawns to support other left wing agenda items i.e. gun grabbing, but if we do so, it’s a crime against humanity. I also find it funny that several children raised by same sex couples, that have expressed their opposition to legalizing gay marriage because of the negative emotional and psychological impact that it had on their lives, are ignored by the lefty media. Of course, they can’t have any opposition, especially from people that actually know what is going on. Further, the only definitive study ever released on this issue, which concludes that children raised by same sex couples, actually do fair WORSE than children raised in traditional family settings, yet, that study is frequently dismissed or ignored by ignorant morons pushing the GLBT agenda!
April 1st, 2013 at 1:23 pm
If we go with genderless marriage, it will be illegal to be Catholic in the US.
Swiftee….I have said something similiar. I don’t really care what the gay community does in their own communities and institutions. But they have pledged a scorched earth policy. You submit to them or they will destroy you. Examples? Boy Scouts, Catholic Charities, Salvation Army. There are virtually no true conservative Christian colleges in the US. The left controls 99% of higher education (do a You Tube search on “Gustavus Adolphus freshman orientation video” to see what goes on in Lutheran schools…this one in St Peter Minnesota). But they have pledged to destroy the remaining 1% of secondary and post-high schools that are still really Bible based. See school in New Ulm where gay rights activists have been protesting against.
April 1st, 2013 at 1:25 pm
Liberals claim to value dialogue, but dialogue requires two viewpoints lest it devolve to stereo monologue. But the Liberal side of the dialogue never varies:
Own a firearm? Crazy. Traditional marriage? Crazy. Taxed Enough Already? Crazy. Protect unborn children? Crazy.
Why would you want dialogue when everything everybody else believes is crazy? And if you truly believe everybody else is crazy . . . .
April 1st, 2013 at 1:29 pm
I agree with you whoheatedly Mitch. My belief is that governments involvement in marriage should be limited to defining contract law.
But I am struck by how times have changed…I’m not that old but I have, within my lifetime, witnessed then: “we want governement out of our personal lives” to now: “we want government in our personal lives over it’s head”
April 1st, 2013 at 2:17 pm
You’re right Chuck, they’ve really been making a focused attack on institutions that provide services to kids. They’ve twisted our kids to turn the polls in their favor.
April 1st, 2013 at 7:59 pm
It is reprehensible for those on the left to attack the little girl.
They should also be embarassed by their shameless exploitation of children.
Specifically the “letters from the children of Sandyhook,” the presence of supposedly the same kids with President Obama while he pimped gun control, and particularly the group of “school kids” with the spinster playing the piano, who were singing the praises of Dear Leader during his first presidential campaign.
That said, it would be hypocritical of me not to express some of the same feelings towards the parents who allowed their 11-year-old daughter appear publicly and express “her” sentiments against homosexual marriage. Had she done the same, but in favor of the issue, I would have blamed the parents. I have to do the same, even if agree with her.
In many matters and venues, children should not be seen or heard.
Humble opinion.
April 1st, 2013 at 9:39 pm
An interesting point was made by one of the amicus briefs to the court. The federal government has no authority to regulate marriage (the states do by default as it is not mentioned in the constitution), and as such is overstepping its bounds when it defines marriage in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The supreme court could throw out DOMA on federalism grounds, leaving the decision on gay marriage entirely up to each state, while forcing the federal government to accept as married any couple that a state declares as married. This is consistent with how the federal government treats heterosexual married couples now, despite having 50 different laws defining heterosexual marriage. Unfortunately for the Roberts court, that does not get it out of the need to settle whether Prop 8, which modified a state constitution, is unconstitutional on equal protection grounds, but it would take the sting out of a finding against the plaintiffs if DOMA was overturned in the process.
April 1st, 2013 at 11:06 pm
Surely, Mitch, you can see the conflict between these statements:
I have supported civil unions – as well as getting government out of the business of administering and giving benefits for marriage – for quite a while.
-and-
I also disagree with the devaluation of the value of gender in parenting (which is a genuine threat to this society)
Marriage is more than a legal contract, it can’t be replaced by civil unions anymore than it can be replaced by serial monogamy, SSM, or the state as a child’s guardian of first choice.
April 2nd, 2013 at 7:47 am
DOMA, first and foremost, relates to taxes. While the states are free to accede to the whims of their lunatic fringe populations, as long as we continue to recognize the federal government’s right to levy income taxes, they do have standing to promulgate the rules of the federal tax code.
99% of the other issues the sand-is-food crew squirts tears about can be handled using existing contract law.
April 2nd, 2013 at 8:01 am
In the olden days (aka “when John F. Kennedy was president”), the family was the fundamental unit of society. Social attitudes, policies and laws to protect and enhance marriage were enacted. No sex outside marriage pushed young men into marriage; no abortion kept them careful; no easy divorce kept couples together; tax deductions helped make marriage desireable and affordable, no welfare forced working people to care for young children and also aged parents.
When the fundamental unit of society became the individual, social attitudes changed. Consequence-free sex, abortion on demand, no-fault divorce, free nursing homes, marriage tax penalty and welfare benefits favoring broken homes helped make traditional married familes undesireable and unaffordable.
We’re at the far end of the pendulum swing. Marriage (for federal purposes) gains you Social Security benefits but little else. Marriage (for state purposes) gains you property rights, inheritance, etc. Government benefits make single parenthood not only possible, but actually profitable. Social attitudes no longer see any legitimate reasons to limit these government benefits to traditional families and why should they? Traditional families have been replaced as the most important focus of society.
If individuals want to spend time together, their receipt of government largesse shouldn’t depend on their genders or, for that matter, on their ages or degree of kinship or number of participants. That’s why same-sex marriage is a cinch to pass and the Equal Protection logic used to justify same-sex marriage inevitably must lead to group marriage, first-cousin marriages and child brides.
This trend will continue until society sees the value in promoting nuclear families again. That won’t come until the external support mechanisms that presently enable individual-focused society to function, collapse. When there is no Medicaid to care for your mother in the nursing home, when there is no Planned Parenthood to free you from the consequences of that one-night-stand, when there are no federal student loans, when there is no daycare to babysit your daughter while you work, you face the choice of changing diapers in your own home or dumping people in the river. Suddenly, a husband becomes more of an asset than a nuisance. That’s when the pendulum will start to swing back. Fortunately, with The First Dear Leader and his party at the helm, we won’t have long to wait.
.
April 2nd, 2013 at 9:17 am
Very good points, Joe. My question is, however, why do you assume that when it all collapses that there won’t be a State? Look at North Korea, perhaps the most impoverished, dysfunctional country around these days and its government is incapable (or unwilling) to provide litle more than a bullet (and that only to the malcontents) to its people, yet it still controls everything in the lives of its people. To take your point, though, it could very well be that in the midst of all this the family has become the main unit of survival.
April 2nd, 2013 at 9:19 am
The external support mechanisms that presently enable individual-focused society to function, is society itself. They collapse when it does…and it is. Only a kool-aid addled, barking moonbat could miss such an obvious truth.
There’s a guy I occasionally trade “tweets” with, a physics PhD candidate somewhere near Rochester, who seems to be a pretty intelligent fellow, even though he tends toward the left. If even casual dalliances with leftist “thinking” can delude a logically minded person enough to miss the inevitable consequences of the left’s “run what ya brung”, “gimme some” utopia, than is it any wonder it irrevocably twists the weak minds of people like Mongrel Cur and Bill Gleason?
April 2nd, 2013 at 11:18 am
Night Writer, I’m assuming that when the federal reserve system collapses and takes down the entire central banking system again (which will not be the first time in our nation’s history – study your Andrew Jackson), all direct entitlement payments will stop: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, Section 8, student loans . . . all of it.
I assume local banks and perhaps states will issue temporary currency (as they did from 1836 to 1913) and eventually Congress will adopt some new central bank scheme and start collecting taxes to redistribute wealth again; but meanwhile, who changes Grandma’s diaper when the nursing home can’t pay the help? How does Single Mother buy food for her kids when the EBT card stops?
No offense, but I don’t care as much about your family as I care about my own family, so I’m not forking over to help you at the expense of me and mine unless my church shames me to do it, or the government forces me to do it. And I suspect my attitude will swing pendulum back to “traditional family” because for the last 6,000 years, that’s been the tried-and-true method to protect women and children while preserving and accumulating wealth. Not saying communes, clans and man-boy love nests can’t accomplish the same thing, only saying I doubt they’ll be as popular when SHTF.
April 3rd, 2013 at 12:23 pm
Swiftee — you write: “As long as we continue to recognize the federal government’s right to levy income taxes, they do have standing to promulgate the rules of the federal tax code.” Maybe. Does that include the power to limit the joint filing benefit to only those who married after going through pre-marital counseling? Or who were not married previously? Or who were 25 years of age or older when married? Or who were married in a recognized church ceremony? Etc.
The point is, if Congress is going to use the term “marriage” as a legal category, it must (at least) accept the definition of that term as used by the states. The fact that makes the joint filing status logical — the fact that most married couples share their incomes and expenses and operate as a single economic unit — applies to all legally married couples.
April 3rd, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Joe Doaks: You write “Marriage (for federal purposes) gains you Social Security benefits but little else.” Not true. Legal marriage gains you pension benefits from your employer’s retirement plan. It gains you the right to take FMLA leave to care for your spouse. It gives your the responsiblity to pay for your spouse’s nursing home care. It gives you a whole array of benefits available to veterans and their spouses. And so on.